The BabyMinder project consisted in providing a proof-of-concept for a novel electroencephalographic (EEG) portable system combined with a sensory stimulation application to track normal and impaired neurocognitive processing in infants. The portable EEG system will be placed on the infants’ head in order to measure the electrophysiological signals generated by the brain in response to various stimuli (e.g. auditory tones, speech, visual objects, predictive cues, social stimuli such as faces, etc.). Although infants are tested for their low-level sensory (visual and auditory) abilities in the health care system, no standard tools exist for evaluating the development of cognitive functions during the first year of life. This is mainly due to the difficulty in assessing these functions in the absence of verbal report and explicit behaviour in infants. The BabyMinder aims to overcome these issues by relying on neural signatures of cognitive functions. Its main purpose is to help the diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorders.
During the project, a prototype of a portable EEG system combined with an API for decoding neural responses to external stimuli has been developed. Several iterations of the prototypes have been made during the project. It has been optimised for being ergonomic, comfortable, and providing reliable EEG signals while remaining adapted to the needs and specificities of infant populations. The PoC prototype is now ready for industrialisation. It consists of a fully embedded wearable devices with 8 active electrodes, which provide reliable EEG signals, yet do not require any electrolyte gel or humidification.
Our device offers direct economic benefits. We have created a low-cost, portable EEG system that is both ergonomic (in terms of usage) and robust (in terms of signal quality), offering substantial improvement over bulky and costly devices currently used in hospitals. Beyond product costs, when used in a clinical context, this portable device will also help cut down hospitalization fees. Moreover, apart from the physician required to interpret the results, it will require no staff with technical expertise in installing and recoding the EEG system.
This projects also offers important societal benefits. Each year, millions of infants are born with neurodevelopment disorders and although some forms of impairment are directly observable through physical malformations or obvious behavioural manifestations, other disorders remain very hard to diagnose in preverbal infants. This is particularly the case for the widespread epidemics of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) that cannot be reliably diagnosed before its behavioural manifestations around 3 years of age. By create a wearable EEG system for infants and combining it with a perceptual stimulation protocol for the automatic tracking of neurocognitive components, the BabyMinder s can help diagnosis long before behavioural manifestation.
